Explanation: What's that below the Milky Way? First, across the top of the above image, lies the faint band that is our planet's sideways view of the central disk of our home Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way band can be seen most clear nights from just about anywhere on Earth with a dark sky. What lies beneath is, by comparison, is a much less common sight. It is the striking peak of Castildetierra, a rock formation located in Bardenas Reales, a natural badlands in northeast Spain. Standing 50 meters tall, the rock spire includes clay and sandstone left over from thousands of years of erosion by wind and water. The astrophotographer waited months for the sky to appear just right -- and then took the 14 exposures that compose the above image in a single night.

The Milky Way Galaxy, like most other galaxies, is a clump of stars and gas arranged in the form of a disk that has diameter of about 160,000 light years. The sun is located about 26,000 light years from the center of the disk.

If we look along the plane of the disk, we see dense arrays of stars. This is the equivalent of looking edgewise at a computer disk or an old LP record. If we look outward from the disk (perpendicular to its plane), we see mostly empty sky. This is the perspective of a bug sitting on the record and looking up.

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